A Privacy Preserving System for Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is changing the way that organizations manage their data, due to its robustness, low cost and ubiquitous nature. Privacy concerns arise whenever sensitive data is outsourced to the cloud. This paper introduces a cloud database storage architecture that prevents the local administrator as well as the cloud administrator to learn about the outsourced database content. Moreover, machine readable rights expressions are used in order to limit users of the database to a need-to-know basis. These limitations are not changeable by administrators after the database related application is launched, since a new role of rights editors is defined once an application is launched. Furthermore, trusted computing is applied to bind cryptographic key information to trusted states. By limiting the necessary trust in both corporate as well as external administrators and service providers, we counteract the often criticized privacy and confidentiality risks of corporate cloud computing.